Dignitaries, VIPs, Celebrities Call on People Everywhere to Pledge Support for the MDGs

Summit culminates with Reception and Interactive Evening

New York, NY —
September 22, 2010

The United Nations Foundation is joining today with Millennium Promise, the Office of the UN Special Envoy for Malaria, the ONE Campaign, and many others to host an event to accelerate progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the 2015 deadline. The live video-streamed event will serve as a call to action to individuals, organizations and corporations to make concrete pledges to achieve the MDGs.

The event - which will include UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Ray Chambers, Bob Geldof, Ted Turner, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al-Abdullah, Tommy Hilfiger, and others - draws upon the power of individual and collective social networks to engage and amplify the ability of individuals, organizations, and online communities to launch their own action-oriented, practical MDG pledges to ensure the MDGs are achieved over the next five years. To support the ongoing work toward achieving the MDGs, the website www.mdgpledges.org will launch as an online hub encouraging and showcasing innovative efforts made to realize the MDGs. The event itself will be live-streamed to the world from 7 - 8pm on Huffington Post Impact at http://huff.to/MDGGA2.

“Achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 will require both a tremendous effort and innovative solutions. Beyond multi-party discussions and intergovernmental conferences, individual organizations and citizens can take definite action in whatever way they can,” said Kathy Calvin, CEO of the United Nations Foundation. “This gathering will highlight the role that every person in the world community has in meeting the MDGs, and that the goals themselves are accessible to everyone - not just governments.”

The event, which will be held at New York City’s Plaza Hotel, will include legions of innovators, who are guiding breakthroughs for the Goals around the world, and the eminent group of MDG Advocates - a group of global business and thought leaders hand-picked by the Secretary-General. The event itself shall serve as the capstone event of the MDG Summit, which concludes on September 22nd in New York.

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About the United Nations Foundation The United Nations Foundation, a public charity was created in 1998 with entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner’s historic $1 billion gift to support UN causes and activities. We build and implement public/private partnerships to address the world’s most pressing problems, and work to broaden support for the UN through advocacy and public outreach. Through our campaigns and partnerships, we connect people, ideas, and resources to help the UN solve global problems. The campaigns we conduct reduce child mortality, empower women and girls, create a new energy future, secure peace and human rights, and promote technology innovation to improve health outcomes. These solutions are helping the UN advance the eight global targets known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). For more information, visit www.unfoundation.org.